Project "Honolulu" is the culmination of significant customer feedback, which has directly shaped product direction and investments. With support for both hybrid and traditional disconnected server environments, Project "Honolulu" provides a quick and easy solution for common IT admin tasks with a lightweight deployment.

I've never managed any servers, so it's difficult for me to gauge how useful of popular tools like these are. What is the usual way people manage their servers?

I would have thought the distributed nature of your tree would have been more of a challenge, but I suppose they've improved AD synchronization. Always felt clunky by comparison with NDS.

I keep hearing the tools weren't/aren't up to snuff, but we never ran into a problem we couldn't handle with native tools except inventory (ran an open source package via GPO's to handle that).

We were distributing some very complex firewall rules (all admin / remote access was locked down to our admin stations and the DC) and if we needed to add a package to a system, or a group of systems, we just added them to the group for that software.

Printers, drive mappings, workstation policies-- these were all relatively simple. The only real complaint I had was that you couldn't add group policy objects to actual groups-- You had to add it to an OU, and use groups to filter whether it was applied or not. That's silly.

I've seen packages that aim to replace all that with a unified engine (LAN Desk is used at my current enterprise), and frankly, other than having a custom interface, I'm seeing very little I couldn't do from within a well designed AD environment.

Those who know me should be amused, since for a long time, I argued against the Microsoft infrastructure-- but then I transferred to a job where the entire ecosystem was Microsoft, and I hate reimplementing the wheel, so I dug in, and learned the Microsoft way.

It does take a fair amount of work to learn-- and it's not as straightforward as it could be. Some additional command line tools were required for bulk operations (sysinternals, primarily), although PowerShell eliminated most of the need for those.

I suspect most people who complain about the lack of capability in ADuc/GPO/GPP/etc never really learned how to take maximum advantage of the available tools. Adding PowerShell to the mix made it even more powerful.

Every operating system has it's own paradigm-- treating a windows desktop like a linux desktop would be disastrous, but equally, treating a linux desktop like a windows desktop would be ridiculous.

It's worth learning the Microsoft Way(tm) if you're going to manage Microsoft systems on a large scale.

Personally? I'm happy to be back in the land of unix/linux system administration.